The Paris Olympics may not have ended on a very high note for team India with her six medals but the country’s contingent came very close to its record medal haul of seven medals achieved in the Tokyo Olympics.
While on the medal front no new records were made, the fandom for Olympics did result in record merchandise sales of team India Olympic kits.
“We have done close to Rs 2 crore of sales which should be the highest ever done for the Indian Olympic kit,” said Divyanshu Singh, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of JSW Sports, the company which was the official kit sponsor of Team India.
Merch sales
The official jersey of team India and the replica kit received the maximum traction from fans. “They (fans) want to wear what their favorite athletes wear. We also saw good response on our travel gear and the tracksuits. This is because the podium pictures which are clicked with Indian athletes, that's always clicked with that gear. So, these are the SKUs (stock keeping unit) that have always done well in sports merchandise and we saw a similar trend, Singh said.
The Team India Paris Olympic products were available across e-commerce and quick commerce platforms along with the JSW’s athleisure brand Inspire.
“We had ensured a multi-platform strategy mainly to leverage direct-to-commerce channels. So our jersey was available on our dedicated eShop, on Myntra, FanCode, Zepto. So that ensured that digital savvy consumers were able to find our product, and we saw that the sales did really well. In our experience of doing sports merchandise over the last three years for the Commonwealth as well as the Asian Games, we expected the best response for the Olympics,” the COO said.
The big takeaway for Singh is that there is potential for sports merchandise to grow in India.
“A lot of pundits keep saying that sports merchandise in India don't work. People don't buy. My take is different. We have a passionate sports fan audience dominated by cricket, but I think if they are provided with good quality products at a good value for money with the right channels, there's no reason that you will not see the demand and the traction. We have done the highest ever sales that have been done for sports merchandise, and we are confident that we'll be able to take many steps forward in times to come,” he added.
This year sales of IPL merchandise also saw a big boost in sales, signalling to the growing sports merchandise market in the country.
Most popular jerseys sold were of Rohit Sharma (Mumbai Indians) and Virat Kohli (Royal Challengers Bengaluru) during the 17th season of the Indian Premier League (IPL). More than 1,100 of these jerseys were sold by FC Shop, the merchandise platform of the live sports streaming service FanCode.
Like the growing interest for sports merchandise, Singh expects a growth in traction for non-cricket sports for India to become a multi-sport nation.
The cricket conundrum
“The reality is that we are not a multi-sporting nation. I don't have anything against cricket. The sport is passion. The sport is a religion to a million people. But it is also important for the fans, for the masses to realise that when you are talking of Olympic disciplines, you are talking of sporting disciplines which are played by over 100 countries,” he said.
Singh said that a lot of the sporting powerhouses of the world do not actually play cricket. “China doesn't play the sport (cricket). Western Europe, which dominates the Olympic rankings, doesn't play the sport. This means that to be a sporting nation, we need to start doing well in sports which are truly competitive and which are truly global. In those sporting disciplines, we also know that for India to start following or watching sport, we need to create heroes. We have seen that with badminton, we have seen that with Indian athletics. I am hoping the same should happen in shooting, which has done really well (in the Paris Olympics).”
However, he added that the truth of the matter is that 90 percent of the spending, be it advertising, be it endorsement, be it media spends, it all goes towards cricket.
“That doesn't mean there is anything wrong that cricket is doing. Cricket is doing something right, which is the reason why that investment is going towards the sport. I would take that the mantle for all the other sports to understand how it is that we can professionalise ourselves better. For instance, the world's number one nation, which is USA, on the Olympic medal tally, all its national sporting federations actually do not get any funding from the government. They all are dependent on private funding. So, why is it that the sporting organisations in India cannot take that role?” questioned Singh.
He thinks that it is the right time to move private funding in all the 16 disciplines India participated in at the Paris Olympics.
CSR spends
There is a huge scope when it comes to CSR (corporate social responsibility) spending in sports, he added.
“Less than one percent of the total spend by corporate India is towards sports. Out of around Rs 27,000 crore total csr spends, only 300 crore is going towards sport. There is huge room for improvement. And if we want to climb up the ladder, spending has to go up," he said.
Focus on newer sports
To climb the rankings in the Olympics (where during the 2024 edition India came in on the 71st position), Singh is expanding focus to more sports disciplines.
“We had good growth from the Tokyo Olympics in the participation of athletes. We had 10 of our athletes who had qualified in the 2021 Olympics and that number saw close to 100 percent growth as 19 of our athletes qualified for the Paris Olympics. Now, we are expanding into new disciplines, which are medal intensive disciplines. Last month, we launched our flagship swimming programme. Swimming had the highest number of medal programmes at the Paris Olympics,” he said.
Currently, India’s Olympic programme is focused on disciplines such as wrestling, which is India's most successful individual Olympic sport, Singh added. “We have won back-to-back medals across four Olympics in wrestling, followed by boxing, where we did not have a great outing as a nation this time.”
JSW Sports has also invested in Judo and is confident to see its result reflected in the LA Olympics in 2028.
“We already have some of India's finest, some of India's only world champions in judo coming from our programme. One such prodigy is the girl called Tababi,” the COO said.
The 16-year-old Tababi created history by winning India a first ever Olympic medal in Judo when she won the silver in the Youth Olympic Games in Argentina in 2018.
“The (close to) 100 percent jump in terms of participation from JSW Sports we can see that repeating in the LA Olympics. We would also like to see more medal winners coming from our programme. So, while it was Neeraj (Chopra), who continues to be an ace athlete, we will definitely have more of our athletes on the podium,” Singh said.
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